The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has transformed throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries. In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of spectrality, demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category: it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon Slender Man, Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes and is shaped by media. Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigour the relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.

An interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans

In February 1978, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E newsletter, founded and edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, established the first public venue for the thriving correspondence of an emerging set of ambitious young poets. It circulated fresh perspectives on writing, politics, and the arts. Instead of poems, it published short essays and book reviews on the model of the private letter. It also featured extensive bibliographies and excerpts of cultural, social, and political theory. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein's L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Complete Facsimile makes available in print all twelve of the newsletter's original issues along with three supplementary issues.

"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment..." Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff ([email protected]), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts of Actis' dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness "the pragmatics of intuition" in all the ways we read, live, and love. "When a loved one dies, there's all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collect, sort, document, store, and discard. Andrea Actis has taken the stuff surrounding her father's death and created a book that is, like grief, in turns heartbreaking, wise, chaotic, drunk, wry, and always unflinchingly honest. This powerful testament of survival is for anyone who has felt the 'déjà vu in reverse' of grief. It is for the living." --Sachiko Murakami, author of Render "Love letter, experimental poem, meditation, conversation with the dead--Andrea Actis's compelling debut is unlike any memoir I've ever read. In one passage, Actis digs out the biggest piece of bone she can find in the vessel of her father's ashes and gently bites on it. Reading Grey All Over I had a similar sensation. Ash. Bone. Love." --Jen Currin, author of Hider/Seeker "This absolutely beautiful work makes plain that seriousness feels like love." --Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live.

"This mechanistic world…has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry."—CAConrad

What do medieval Icelanders mean when they say "troll"? What did they see when they saw a troll? What did the troll signify to them? And why did they see them? The principal subject of this book is the Norse idea of the troll, which the author uses to engage with the larger topic of paranormal experiences in the medieval North. The texts under study are from 13th-, 14th-, and 15th-century Iceland. The focus of the book is on the ways in which paranormal experiences are related and defined in these texts and how those definitions have framed and continue to frame scholarly interpretations of the paranormal. The book is partitioned into numerous brief chapters, each with its own theme. In each case the author is not least concerned with how the paranormal functions within medieval society and in the minds of the individuals who encounter and experience it and go on to narrate these experiences through intermediaries. The author connects the paranormal encounter closely with fears and these fears are intertwined with various aspects of the human experience including gender, family ties, and death. The Troll Inside You hovers over the boundaries of scholarship and literature. Its aim is to prick and provoke but above all to challenge its audience to reconsider some of their preconceived ideas about the medieval past.

"William Blake is a universal artist--an inspiration to visual artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide as well as everyone who aspires to the ideals of personal, spiritual, and creative liberty. His heroic story has inspired an invigorated generations. His personal struggles during a period of political terror and oppression, his technical innovations, and his political commitment all remain deeply relevant today. This book presents a comprehensive overview of Blake's work as a printmaker, poet, and painter, foregrounding his relationship with the art world of his time and telling the stories behind many of his most iconic images."--

This monograph is an interdisciplinary study of the concept of 'fragment' in literature and in critical and literary theory. It discusses the fragment's performativity and function within a historical perspective, stretching from Heraclitus, via the German Romantics and European writers of the Modernist period, to American postmodern manifestations of the fragment. This is the first history of the fragment to appear in English, and it is also the first attempt at producing a consistent taxonomy of literary and critical fragments. The fragments are categorised according to function, not author intention, and the study addresses a number of questions: What constitutes the fragment, when the fragment can only be defined a posteriori? Does the fragment begin on its own, or is it begun by others, writers and critics? Does it acquire a name of its own, or is it labelled by others? All these questions revolve around issues of agency, and they are best discussed in terms of performativity, which means seeing fragments as acts: acts of literature, acts of reading, acts of writing. The book demonstrates how a poetics of the fragment as a performative genre can be created, situating the fragment both as literature and as a phenomenon within postmodern criticism against the background of philosophy, art history, and theology.